What Canonical Marketing Team Blog talks about

Posts tagged with 'cloud'

As I mentioned yesterday, we ran a webinar on Canonical’s Infrastructure as a Service offering – the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. A wise old man (I am being quite literal here) told me that the secret to any sort of success is persistence – no amount of talent or luck suffices to get you there, wherever “there” happens to be for you. And so, as marketers, we do things – run webinars, host events, write blog posts (it’s Friday morning and I am feeling all self referential and post modern), publish data sheets, perform market segmentation and competitive analysis, et cetera. To have success, we need to take an occasional pause, and ask ourselves how useful our various activities are, so that if we are veering off course (away from the “there”), we can take appropriate action. Otherwise, we end up going through motions that have only appearances behind them (like the business man that the kid wants to keep as a pet in the “Can I keep him” sketch from Kids in the Hall).

So yesterday we had a morning and an afternoon session of a webinar about our offering for IaaS, our services around it (including the Landscape system management offering). We had a very decent turnout and excellent questions (the Q&A sessions were going up to the last second). At the same time (and I have been told that I have a weakness for giving myself more work) I am pondering breaking the webinar into two – one focused on an overview of cloud computing and the value proposition of our IaaS offering (the “why it is a good idea” in general and “why Canonical’s flavor of this good idea is particularly good” in particular), with a follow-up webinar focused on the services and management tools and how our offering would be executed and managed technically.

I am not talking fluff for the first webinar. Actually, the challenge here would be to have a clear enough presentation of our vision and offering for someone who is looking askance at the entire “cloud” thing is the latest “buzzword” – all sound and no honey. So, let me see if I can can produce a presentation deck and demo outline. If anyone has thoughts on the topic, feel free to pipe up.

The good part about LinuxCon were the sessions I attended and the people I spoke with. The bad part was the sessions I did not manage to attend.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder, as they say, so at this juncture of the narrative I actually have some fond memories of my sojourn in Paris Island, North Carolina, where I learning various life affirming skills as US Marine recruit. Dark humor aside, I remember being instructed by one of the Drill Instructors about what happens when a Drill Instructor speaks. If you are curious, the answer is “The world stops” (some epithets were added to that, but I will leave their specific nature to your imagination ).

Not having become a Drill Instructor, the world around me keeps churning. Business travel is a bit of a mixed bag – being away from the office allows you to focus on the purpose of travel (though between my cell phone and WiFi access and IRC one could easily fail to notice the difference between being in the office and being on the road). Going to a local event (LinuxCon taking place in Boston and me taking place in Boston) does not get me far enough from the day to day to escape from it. So, I got in to LinuxCon Tuesday afternoon, was there on Wednesday (with some breaks to do dry runs of a webinar on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud we ran today), and today I was back in the office, running the morning and afternoon sessions of the webinar.

So I certainly feel I did not manage to experience the full scope of the event. One of the themes I did “get” was Linux in the Enterprise – both by way of proliferation, as well as by what needs to happen for Linux and Open Source Software adoption to grow. An interesting piece of research was published on August 8th by Accenture, showing some interesting numbers around OSS adoption, as well as what is perceived to be the benefits (reliability, stability, speed of bug resolution and cost saving, though cost saving is not the number one reason) around OSS and what are the challenges (perceived lack of sufficient number of developers with skill around OSS and top management buy in).

Bill McQuaide from Black Duck Software gave a talk on distributed, multi-source development with OSS. Bill showed how, practically speaking, a large organization could manage its software writing and managing efforts in an environment where OSS is a component in the final product. I think that this particular vision could go a long way towards putting executives’ minds at ease about OSS – showing not only that its introduction into the enterprise will not cause harm, but actually how it can make an organization’s code better.

The term “Cloud” is getting so much buzz that it sometimes feels like white noise (or the buzz of an annoying fly that no amount of swatting will keep away from your newspaper/coffee/breakfast). The second data resides on the web, or software is provided as a service, the term “Cloud” seem to settle on the brain, gleefully rubbing its little paws.

The thing is, the term has a specific meaning, as distinct from “on the Internet.” As a matter of fact, it is an important meaning, with very specific implications, considering what actual cloud offerings are out there, available for Enterprises.

Canonical has a cloud (or Infrastructure as a Service, to be more precise) offering, and next week, on August 12th, we will be showcasing it and showing how you can administer it. Registration is open for those who want to check it out.